"I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."

“I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.” -Alan Greenspan

In 1991 Ronald Coase won the Nobel Prize for economics. Coase's eponymous theorem and accompanying 1937 paper emphasizing transaction costs may have lent credence Mr. Greenspan's and others' 'Objectivist' world views.

In a worse case scenario, this has resulted in a childish cult of Ayn Rand obsessives who finding themselves empowered by the tinkering of a Republican political machine absent-mindedly left over from the Nixon administration. At best, it has injected a healthy intellectual debate, albeit with some deeply flawed, and currently costly, perspective; but nonetheless intellectually elevating.

This may result in some unfortunate future branding difficulties for those who have embraced titles like "neo-con" or the eminently hilarious "new world order." However, in post-Bush era administration, the need to continue the debate beyond we have "found a flaw" politicking and proselytizing is of imminent importance.

Ironically, it was John F. Kennedy who was famously quoted, "a rising tide lifts all boats." In an election where the Democratic candidate has, fairly or not, been gifted Kennedy's cultural legacy, their economic policies would seemingly clash.

However, to tie Kennedy, Coase, Bush, Obama, McCain, and even to weave in the obvious contextual background of "trickle-down" or "Reaganomics" paints with too broad a brush from an inadequate contextual palate.

Instead, suffice to say that siren's song of purified Objectivism has lured our economic philosophy, and possibly even our social philosophy, into a rut that demands the already cliched, not yet dry, and scarily graven image-like promise of "Change."

This, as it was with Kennedy, is likely a positive development, both economically and unquestionably socially, but what will define this promise is the retroactive implications of the reaction to this paradigm shift.

Instead of continuing these reduncies the point may more importantly be that we have reached what Yeats' characterized as a 'Fin de siecle,' more than an end of the Century, but the end of a gyre. More than a pendulum swing, there is a real inversion going on, which in a sense brings an entirely new length of string. This is not to suggest a nihilist type cancelling or balancing even, but merely a vast expanse of "newness" whose dismissal as too philosophical or too sentimental could have disasterous consequences.